Heat sinks and thermal designers go where the action is: LED lighting

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"BEST in class was around 60 Lumen/watt" How long ago was that seminar? There are reputable manufacturers with >100 lumen/watt LEDs with production quantities ready for purchase and in use. Nichia, Cree, Osram to name a few. Were the LEDs being discussed targeted for the SSL market?

People need to be more skeptical of the LED claims. Even the mediocre white LED sources use double the electricity of tube fluorescent. ~50 Lumens/watt for LED versus 108 for "Normal" good Fluorescent and 75 as a legal minimum. Your analysis of price is correct, but Fluorescent is now lasting 46000 hours from all the major manufacturers at a cost of 3 dollars. The Hurdle that LED will face is the fixtures not the sources. Try to convince someone who owns a strip mall of rental space to rip out all of those 4 foot fixtures and replace them for rental spaces...NOT going to happen. LED will be big in New Construction. I attended the last global summit and the white LED (Blue LED with phosphor modifications) BEST in class was around 60 Lumen/watt. Not commercial yet. The Phopshor efficiency was 93% so there is only 7% better it could even theoretically get! That is the dirty little secret about LED it is an energy PIG. Measurement is instant light output (50 milliseconds) before the chip heats up and the output falls 40% but nobody is making them present sustained output. Go to Sams Club and pick up a package from Lights of America - there is all sorts of comparisons to incandescent Wattage, but nowhere does it tell you how much light (lumens) you get. You could assume that the little LED candleabra bulb that uses just 1.5 watts and replaces a 40Watt incandescent is apples to apples on light output but that would be wrong. You actually only get 1/4 the light of the incandescent.

When people started using CFLs they cost between $15 and $20 per bulb, compared to less than $1 for an incandescent light bulb, but value conscience people understood the value of the CFL. Today we are going through the same transition; yes LED solutions (including the thermal management portion of it) are more expensive than CLFs, incandescent and linear florescent solutions. However LEDs use a fraction of the energy and last nearly a generation, over 15 years when used for 8 hours a day. The $15 mentioned in the article was for both the heat sink and the Nuventix SynJet Cooler and also was for low volume production. We strongly believe that as volumes go up the costs will go down. Just like the $750 DVD player now costs $49, the cost of LED and their thermal solutions will come down as volumes go up. Even at the current cost point it is not uncommon to see situations that have a payback period of 12 to 24 months and to value conscience consumer that is a trade off worth making.

People in the western half of the United States (or the Ponderosa Steak House, if you live in New Jersey) probably encounter 'wagon wheel' light fixtures hangning from the ceiling. The wheel provides 'atmosphere', it's otherwise simply a support for the fixtures. ~~~ LED lighting changes this in that the chunk of 'decorative' alumnium under the emitter isn't just 'decorative'. It might look like a Buck Rogers spaceship or a mag wheel or Liberty $1 coin but if you have an LED you're going to have one of these with it. Don't count on seeing to many 'Colonial Style' carriage lights with splayed fin heat sinks.